Wageningen University & Research: Computer Vision Breakthrough Expected in Maritime Research
Every two months, we introduce you to one of our Vision+Robotics specialists. We give an insight into the person, their research and their expectations. This time, it’s marine biologist and computer scientist Jeroen Hoekendijk: “I listen to researchers and identify which problems seem similar from a computer vision perspective, so that we can tackle them efficiently in parallel.”
It was the huge six-foot dorsal fin rising out of the water that did it. Jeroen Hoekendijk, then 21, was stunned into silence. He knew that orcas were often seen along the east coast of Vancouver Island: that’s why he and his family had travelled to the Johnstone Strait in Canada. With its abundance of salmon, and the pebble beaches that serve as back scratchers, the channel is effectively a marine playground for orcas. But sitting in his kayak in a sheltered bay, waiting for the rest of the group to take to the water, the sudden appearance of the huge male orca still took Hoekendijk totally by surprise. “It really made its mark on me.” He got straight onto the phone and told his brother, who was still in the Netherlands, to sign him up for a degree in marine biology in Groningen. He managed to get his name down just before the deadline.
Automated image recognition
While studying for his master’s degree, Hoekendijk ended up on Texel, at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). After five years of research, he was awarded a PhD for his thesis: ‘Through the looking-glass: marine mammal monitoring in a changing world’. “Researchers have been taking aerial photographs of seals for years. They then count the seals manually to further their understanding of population trends. I wondered if you couldn’t do that automatically.”
Marine ecologists and biologists like to borrow from each other’s Vision + Robotics methodologies. They use programmes previously developed for other kinds of scientific research. This is because they are themselves often not pioneers of technology, Hoekendijk says. “But we do need to see those technologies in order to understand how to use them within a different context.” This is something that interests him. “As marine biologists, how can we apply the latest Vision + Robotics tools within our own bubble of ecological issues?”